A Journalist's Report in German

In the summer, I took Peter Haffner around on a tour of Samaria and Binyamin and here, now, is the product (via Google Translate):-

ISRAELI TRAVEL


The Jewish state considers itself in a new world: Report from a difficult land.

...It still is a little early for wine, but we are in the "Promised Land", and the Cabernet Sauvignon from the winery Psagot wants to be tasted. Yisrael Medad, a giant with a baritone voice raises the glass. Medad represents the Samaria District of West Bank land, including Judea, the area in which the biblical story of the Old Testament took place.


Thirty years ago, he came from New York. Yisrael has the warmth of a shirt-sleeved American. Has a Palestinian taxi driver, who here took me from Ramallah, he stretched out the car window, the hand is turned to me and said, "You will not see that here we have no apartheid." Fuad, an elderly man with a dry wit, had participated, and Medad has not noticed the shadow of disaffection, which the Arabs flitted across his face.


We take a ride through the area, to visit the settlements Eli, Ariel and Shiloh, where Yisrael lives. He is an entertaining guide. Migron comes into view, created in 1999 from trailers, also one of the outposts illegal under Israeli law, where just three buildings were demolished on orders from the Supreme Court. In the "Robbers' Canyon" [Wadi Haramiya] we see an abandoned police station of the British era and then the place where a neighbor of Yisrael's was shot. Previously, he says, he had always gone out of his house with a gun, but today he was unarmed, like most here.

Hila Luxembourg, who sits at the wheel, has a birthday. It is the day that Mahmoud Abbas is in the United Nations requesting the inclusion of Palestine, and she says sarcastically, what a nice birthday gift she received. She is 27 and drives barefoot, with one leg under the other, her voice surprisingly deep for the petite figure.  She has a bit of the timid lasciviousness. As we stand on a hill overlooking the Jordan valley, Yisrael says all you need to do is open the Bible and find everything that you see here, she says, "this is our country."


They will say it again and again. The Bible is not only the history, it is also the land register. For Hila and Yisrael, the West Bank belongs to Israel, and with his speech at the Bar Ilan University, Netanyahu spoke out under pressure from the Americans for a Palestinian state, the prime minister for them has become a traitor [we never used that term]. He who tills the land takes possession of it under the old [Turkish] law, says Yisrael, and is annoyed that the government does not want to see that they, the settlers, "are the vanguard and vanguard facing east". Hila pulls out a book with a topographic profile of the area from which it is visible that the hills are a strategic height, from which the flat coastal land, Tel Aviv and Haifa present themselves as targets.


Yisrael is not a zealot, and has a calm answer to every objection for his compatriots, most of which are for a two-state solution, or the Middle East Quartet, USA, EU, UN and Russia, which calls the settlements and stop demolition of the outpost. For him there is no illegal construction in the West Bank. "There were Jewish communities here before 1948, and we just continue what they started," he says.


The settlements, neat houses with red roofs and lots of green perched on the hills, close to one another in curved rows as fortified villages. The neighboring Arab villages are not maintained equally, and I remarked that one could distinguish the two from the outside only in the mosques with minarets. Yisrael joins with polite silence. He points to Luban e-Sharqiya, an Arab village whose name like many others here have Hebrew roots, and to Sinjil which recalls Crusader Prince Raymond de Saint Gilles' fortress, now a mosque.

About a third of the communities are populated by ultra-Orthodox, one-third secular/traditionalists and one-third National Religious or "modern Orthodox", one of which Yisrael lives in. The waiting list is long. There are families growing, there is need for more houses and more land. There is no lack of space, and know nothing of politics, one might ask, what is really the problem. Unlike in East Jerusalem must be distributed no one here, and the Israeli settlements not only create jobs for Palestinians in agriculture. In nindustry, there are approximately eight hundred settlers, and out of a total of 17 000 employees in the various companies, 11 000 are Arabs, says Yisrael.


Of sabotage by Palestinians and Settlers who destroy their property, crops, and destroyed the vines, which is being devastated to hear of this little region. Hila emphasized how normal they are all here, not fanatics and fundamentalists, and how it felt even her friends and acquaintances to be portryaed as people who, after work, go to put a Palestinian olive tree on fire, before they go to bed.


The attachment to the land, the feeling of being part of the history of the Jewish people to be, is felt as proud of what you have created by looking at the floor, with the Palestinians, it can be, knowing what to do. The sense of community here is strong pull, and for many the main reason both say, everyone knows everyone, and we help each other find themselves on top of that on the front pages of world press. "If I build a porch at my house, President Obama knows it," jokes Yisrael.


...Israeli university professors have called for a boycott of the College of Ariel, and the settlement was in the headlines, as an artist, said they would not occur in the newly built cultural center. The Knesset passed on this one "law for the prevention of damage caused by the boycott of Israel", who is involved in calls can be sued for damages and excluded from government subsidies. This was contrary to the constitution, criticized lawyers, and the Israeli peace organization called Peace Now in the wake of the boycott of all products from settlements in the West Bank. "To hurt most of all the Arabs who work for us," said Yisrael.

We have lunch...
 
What would he do if he were Palestinian, I ask Yisrael Medad. "I would say to me, we fought against the Jews, ninety years, and what has brought it? Nothing, "he replies without hesitation. "Fifty years ago, I would perhaps have been Palestinians as a terrorist, but today?" He thinks they should according to Jordan, where they are already in the majority. The question of whether he could imagine to live in the West Bank under Palestinian administration, is not for him.